


Sounds Like Something You'd Lie About

by LordJixis



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Bringing People Back To Life, M/M, Magic, PSA:, Trans Enjolras, and dogs, dont
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 07:21:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19662541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LordJixis/pseuds/LordJixis
Summary: Grantaire handles his problems.He doesn't do it well.Thankfully, Enjolras is the exact same.





	Sounds Like Something You'd Lie About

Grantaire didn't much care for being alive, or any of the swill associated with it. He liked to drink, he liked to smoke, and he liked to sleep. That was all.

And his dog.

He _really_ liked his dog.

He was a cynic by choice, something incapable of belief or hope. He'd drilled this philosophy through his bones, burnt it behind his eyelids. He refused to see the world as anything but what it was: shitty.

So he had known that the dog would die.

Knowing something doesn't _prepare_ you, though.

So when he came home from his shitty art school to his shitty apartment and his dog was cold, sprawled on the shitty floor, he had no game plan. Which, in the end, was the only reason any of this happened.

If he'd made a plan beforehand, it probably would've been something normal – called up Bahorel, or Bossuet, and bury her in a nice place. Lay some flowers. Get roaring drunk and only sober up when his card declined at the liquor store.

Since he hadn't prepared, though – he picks up the dog's body and puts it in the freezer, grabs one of the bottles nestled in there, and goes to his grandparent's house.

He doesn't tell them why he's there – his grandma doesn't recognize him, hasn't for months, and never will again, and his grandpa is singularly disinterested in anything that doesn't directly involve her and her well-being. So he says hello, wanders into their attic, and starts looking around.

Back before everything went to shit, his grandma had taken him up here, tucked a sliver of amethyst into the crease of his palm, and proceeded to draw back her fist for a punch that was guaranteed to knock him out. He'd flinched, and waited – and it had never come.

When he finally looked up, she was smiling a bright smile and telling him he'd be moving in.

It was, by all accounts, the best thing that had ever happened to him.

He'd spent endless days in this attic, searching through books in languages he couldn't understand until he suddenly did, poking through shattered ceramics until they were suddenly whole, and pondering over dead moths till they suddenly flew.

It was the last one he was concerned by, because he wasn't above necromancy to bring back the only good thing in his miserable life.

He might've spent days curled in the corner, he might've spent weeks. Time wasn't the same, in the attic. The low light of a summer afternoon streamed through the window no matter the day or season, and when he exited it had always been three hours and thirty-three minutes, to the dot.

So he stayed there for days on days, read books with a tenacity that can only come from those deranged enough to believe they could simply force themselves to understand languages that may have never really existed, took notes with a pen that seemed to change shape and color every time he picked it up, and ended up with a ritual that was almost certainly illegal – if there was a police force tasked with this kind of thing.

Or even aware of this kind of thing.

There wasn't, as far as he knew, so he left his grandparent's with twelve pages of multicolored notes and doodles, a hard candy he was pretty sure was expired (but his grandma's wrinkled hand had pressed it into his, so he would eat it anyway), and a severe case of dehydration.

It was the dehydration that changed his life, somehow, not the multiple scrawled pages of a ritual to raise the dead. Well, that played a part too, but it was the dehydration that made him faint before he was even halfway home.

He'd opened his eyes to blue, and assumed he'd died because it was simply too bright a color to exist in real life. He wasn't all that concerned – honestly, dying to be with his dog was a lot less convoluted than bringing his dog back from the dead – but then the blue had blinked, revealing that what he'd thought was supernatural to be eyes, and he'd been incapable of doing anything but blinking back.

And running his mouth, of course. If there was one thing that defined Grantaire, it would be his big, fat mouth. “Wow, they really rolled out the premium angel for me, huh?” He was still operating under the assumption he'd died, though the discomfort creeping through his muscles was trying it's best to discount that theory.

“W-Wha?” the angel stuttered, which was another point against the whole dead thing – though what really should've tipped him off was the fact he'd been in heaven, not hell.

Still, he wasn't above riding this to it's natural conclusion and praying the blue eyed 'angel' was flattered instead of confused. Or offended. “Oh, I'm sorry, do you all look like that up here?”

The strangers face twists up into something that could neither be described as 'smitten' or 'full of rage', then smooths into something like cool distaste. And while that wasn't preferred, per se, it was something Grantaire could work with. “I think you're hallucinating – I'm meeting my med student friend, come with me.” Their tone was all business, and while it shouldn't have meshed well with the high pitch their voice carried, it worked.

He didn't have a reason not to, really. So he gathered up the spill of papers that had presumably fallen from his hand sometime between him standing safely upright and him lying on the ground and trotted after the angel-that-was-definitely-not-an-angel.

They didn't lead him far, which was probably good – half a block had him feeling somewhat faint again and he figured sporadic bouts of unconsciousness were no way to woo someone. He managed to remain upright all the way through the doors of the Musain, where he promptly ordered a water to continue this feat.

He was waved over to a back corner by the blond – who he'd just now realized was _tiny,_ wow – and was gestured to sit by a stern looking man with the whole hot librarian thing _really_ going for him. “I'm not actually the promised med student,” he says, a slight quirk to his lips, “but I know how to check for a concussion.” He does the light in the eyes thing, and whatever happens seems to be good enough because then Granatire only has to answer a few questions before he's declared 'probably not dying'.

It's really a ringing endorsement – Grantaire has spent a decent amount of his life in the 'probably dying' category.

“You should probably stay until the real med student gets here – but if you stay for the whole meeting, we won't even tell him you fainted.” The non-med student grins t him like they were sharing some kind of secret. He blinks back and supposes that somewhere, that sentence makes sense.

He doesn't actually have anything against staying, though. It's kind of nice to not just fall from days of barely-understandable research to days of barely-manageable spellwork, so he stays put as people trickle into the cafe.

The blond and their friend get very involved in their discussion about crime reports and ethnicity rates, so when a familiar face came through the door it wasn't hard at all to slip away. “Bossuet!” he calls. Said man grins at him from where he was holding the door for Joly, and suddenly the med student comment makes much more sense. He greets Joly with the same enthusiasm, and follows them into a back room he'd never seen used for anything but make-outs and drunken fights.

“So you're coming to a social justice meeting? Excuse my disbelief – but _why_?”

He didn't really know how to explain that without worrying Joly, but he tries his best. “I bumped into the blond out there and they invited me in. I didn't actually know what for till you just asked that.”

“That explains quite a bit.” Joly waggles his eyebrows. Grantaire hopes that doesn't mean he's as obvious about his attraction to the blond – and really, he didn't even have a name for the face yet – as he felt like he was.

He probably was. Or maybe they were just that close. Or maybe he had a type. “I would be offended, but you guys have me pinned.”

And it turned out they really did – over the course of the meeting, he learns quite a few things. One was that he never, ever would've come to this without some external force acting upon him. The blond guy – and now he knew for sure they're a guy, from other people referring to him, (Enjolras, someone had called him, and wasn't that hilarious.) – was the obvious leader, and he stood at the front borderline shouting about racism and sexism and ways they could combat it – ways that were ubiquitously meaningless, because no one read the letters that came in to government offices and petitions were just a way to feel good about oneself. The second was that Enjolras wasn't just hot – he was magnetic. He had his own gravitational field. He was the sun that everyone else in the room was orbiting around, and in this metaphor, Grantaire was Pluto. Relegated to the back, far from the warmth of a shy smile or a kind word – things bestowed upon Mercury and Venus with no thought.

Still, he was entranced, captured – _smitten_.

So much so that he didn't notice the librarian-to-be shuffling through his papers till he mumbles a faint _what language is this?_

Immediately his attention is pulled to the guy who'd somehow sat right by him without his noticing. “Urm.” He said, because there was no contingency plan for this situation and he couldn't even answer that because he didn't fucking _know_.

The notes he'd needed to take didn't translate well into English, so most of it was in the archaic script that never made sense until it did, and he certainly hoped that whatever annotations he'd peppered through it in English weren't enough to clue him in on the exact contents of the papers.

“Sorry,” the man murmurs, not sounding the least bit so. “Linguistics is one of my passions. Would you mind telling me the name of this language?”

“Uh.” Grantaire has no fucking idea. He has no idea if it even was a real language. He could've made it up in a fit of delusion. “I... don't know?”

That got him a severe glance from over wire-framed spectacles. “Why were you carrying it around then? Is this not written by you?”

“Uh.” Grantaire didn't really lie, as a general thing. He's found that if you say the truth with enough sarcasm, it serves the same purpose with only half as much guilt. “Yeah, _of course_ the language I don't know was written by me.”

He looks singularly unimpressed. Which – fair. That wasn't one of Grantaire's better moments.

He flips through the pages, and Grantaire only has a moment to think oh shit when his eyes go wide, because it either means the read-it-long-enough-and-you'll-understand-it works for everyone or one of his English scribbles had given it away.

He tries to grab the papers back – really, why hadn't he done that in the first place – but they're easily shuffled away from him, the man's eyes going steadily wider under his glasses.

There's a moment where Grantaire is trying to plan how to get the papers back and run for the hills without causing a fuss, and it's just long enough for the other man to figure out something because he's suddenly hauling them both away and out into the front room. This is all great and well because it's where Grantaire was going to escape to anyway, but the grip around his wrist might as well be a handcuff for how unyielding it is.

He's pulled into the darkest corner, far from both the door and other patrons. He's not so much shoved into the corner bench as he is politely but forcefully nudged into it, but the end result is the same and he dearly regrets coming to this meeting at all.

“Does this work?” the other man's voice is urgent.

Grantaire briefly considers pretending to have no idea what he's talking about – it would probably be the smartest option, considering he could be one of the magical police he'd been pretty sure didn't exist – but he looks desperate and slightly deranged and very, very hopeful. Grantaire's pretty sure that's how he'd looked when he'd come home to his dog stiff and cold.

This man has something – someone – he'd lost.

Grantaire wouldn't say he had a bleeding heart, or even a proper heart, really, but seeing that expression plastered on someone else's face – well. “I don't know. I haven't tried it yet. But it would only work on the newly dead, or a very well-preserved body.”

“That's not a problem.” He swallows, makes a whole production of it, and his voice is unfathomably rough when he continues. “Look, if this works – I'll give you anything. I know _lots_ of people who would, really; my whole life savings, my house, anything you want. I just need – this would fix everything.”

“Woah, I'm not trying to sell this. I'm pretty sure it's illegal? So maybe don't tell the whole merry bunch, okay?”

“I won't – I have to tell Enjolras though.”

Nope. No, no, no – the hot blond revolutionary does not need to know shit about the creepy stuff Grantaire does in his downtime. He says as much, and the man's face turns sickly and serious.

“I don't think you understand. It wouldn't be for me – it would be for him.” And the sentence is stressed all wrong; there's layers here and Grantaire should've gotten drunk enough to breeze right through them because now he's just lost.

  
“He, uh. He's lost someone?”

“No, he –“ He looks pained, looks like he'll be sick right on the table. Grantaire hasn't known him that long, doesn't even know his name, nothing, but he feels like this isn't a man to lose his cool like this. Necromancy might be a bit out of the normal scope of life, but there's something here he isn't quite catching. It's gnawing at his skin. “Look, I can't give him false hope. Please, just tell me if it works on humans or not. I really will give you anything you could possibly want.”

“I haven't tried, yet. I don't know. They can't have been dead for long, and the body needs to have been frozen as soon as possible. And... I was using it for my dog.” It feels wrong to say that, when he is obviously so torn up over a human, but it's not like he can lie. “So I'd have to tweak it for a human.”

“That won't be a problem. Are you going to try? _Could_ you make it work for a human?” He should say no. He doesn't know these guys, he doesn't know Enjolras, and nothing good can come from this – he can see it in the desperate eyes, the pinched lips.

“Yes.”

“Please, when you do, if it works – please. Please come back. We're here every Monday and Friday.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I will.” He doesn't want to mean it, but -

Enjolras walks out into the main room then, and the blue eyes could be lasers with the way they pierce right through him. “Yeah,” he says absently, wondering who Enjolras had lost that could make someone else look like he just had.

* * *

It works.

**Author's Note:**

> This has been on my computer for half a year now. I have the first half of the story pre-written but damn does it need some editing. Updates will be erratic.


End file.
